Sunday, 30 June 2013

She worries about her daughter, why wouldn’t she? She fears, no she knows, somehow she has always known, that she is cursed.

It is nonsense of course, she doesn't believe in curses, but she has had an extraordinary amount of sheer bad luck.

For a few years things were good, once they had recovered from the shock of Harvey’s death. Not recovered exactly, but slowly laughter returned to the flat. That first time when a bird somehow came in through the back window, began flying around in the living room, the three of them trying to chase it out and at the same time stop the bird from hurting itself flying into the windows. Lewis trying to be manly but also freaking out and ducking and scrambling around over the sofa when the bird came straight at his head. Paula Adonor and Laura, who must have been seven or eight at the time, laughing and supertense at the same time until after twenty minutes or so they managed to chase it out of the front door and stood there, the three of them, out of breath and sweaty, arms around each other, watching the bird wing its way across the edge of the estate and disappear behind the flats across the road

Where did it come from, this little bird, shattering the grief they had all been sunk in? When she thinks back she remembers that in her mind over and over as the bird slowly disappeared she was saying gooodbye, goodbye, goodbye and thank you, thank you. That night in bed she wept but the quality of her weeping was different now, if before it had been traumatic, uncontrollable, tearing through her, now it was deep and emollient, a hopeful weeping, tears that watered and restored her rather than emptied her out.

Goodbye, goodbye. Life is all goodbyes, to the moment, the minute, the day before, the years and all the lives that gave them shape. And this moment, this Summer, this year? This year she has found herself nostalgic, perhaps not nostalgic really, but niggled at by the past, by twenty years ago, by her youth. She feels indebted. She has no time to feel that way, another sense of obligation, another duty she could well do without, but the pressure of the unresolved seems to mount in her month by month and a probably futile, probably wasteful demand that she set everything in order, tie up loose ends, honour the past has been needling her. Among all the other things she needs to do, among all the other worries she has, her daughter not least among them, still she seems to have found time to think about Vernon again, almost to brood, to dwell upon him. On her way to work in the morning when she is trying to read or catch up on work-related issues she finds her thoughts are drifting back toward him. A few weeks ago her heart thudded up into her throat glancing up as the train pulled into London Bridge, seeing a boy somewhere in his mid-twenties who looked a lot like Vernon, as though somehow he had never aged and could reappear like this, to sit down beside her and explain it all away. She has found herself now and then gazing at men around her own age and wondering perhaps if they might not in fact be him, trying to imagine precisely what he might look like now.

Of course it is this email, coming in out of the blue from Alex Hargreaves and the reminder of the website she set up, that Lewis helped her set up a few years ago, to put Vernon's stuff online. Perhaps so she could rid herself of it. Not have to take it with them when inevitably, the flat is sold out from under them and they have to move further out, to the coast. Digitize it then throw the actual objects away, if she could bring herself to.

That long week of waiting for Vernon to return and the realisation that somehow, mysteriously he was not coming back. At first she was incredulous that he would just cut her out of his life and then it became clear that he had disappeared somewhere on the road, drifted away into the night. She went over and over it for years of course, trying to trace his moves, understand what had been going on in his mind, the fragile nature of his psyche, back in those days, his natural intensity, the drugs, the obsessive behaviour, the recklessness.

Imagine him, poor Vernon, back in 1996 ,walking on the road somewhere between Castleford Station and Jerry’s rundown farmhouse with his army kit bag slung over his shoulder, his mind on fire, breathing softly in the dark, in the final stage of distributing all his worldly goods and then suddenly, somewhere between the point of departure and his destination, simply stepping out of the world. No body ever found, no contact ever resumed with anyone. When they asked Howard, what was his state of mind, what was he saying? he told them, well, you know, he was being Vernon. Hyped up, talking a lot of complicated things, not always coherent or comprehensible, he seemed to be himself, he looked no worse than usual. They pressed him on it, they wanted there to have been some telltale moment some key to what came later, but Howard had nothing to say. He shrugged. Look, he said, we got wrecked in the bookshop and he set off for Jerry's, I don’t remember that much about it. I didn't know, I wish I had known but I didn’t, couldn’t know it would be....

The last time. Those last times, how can we know, how can we value what we have when the future is so opaque, when all our assumptions turn out to be wrong, when our plans dissolve and we are constantly anchorless, rudderless? How can we grasp any moment and understand, this is the last time we will embrace, or make love, the last time I'll see you, speak to you, hear you say my name, touch your living flesh. The last chance I have to stop you, call you back, to confess my love, to offer comfort. Let me in.

Let me in. She rolls over in bed and hears, she thinks, her daughter rolling over, restless too in her room, the walls in these old flats so thin, and Lewis moaning in his room, locked away forever now inside himself. Someone goes past drunk and singing at one fifteen on a Tuesday morning, the antisocial, irresponsible bastard. People have work. Let me in, into your thoughts, into your fears, into the ways you’re being driven. Let me in to time, let me see how this goes so that I might avert things, twist you round, hold you away from danger and despair.

But no. Again and again no. You are locked outside any access to that which is most vital to your own life and there is only relishing the moment, here we are, alive still, full of love still, the end has not yet come for us, let us relish this bittersweet evanescence. The moment, the moment. She’s drifting off to sleep and moments return to her, swirling in, mingling and overlapping ,a comforting confusion of place and time and persona, losses restored, the dead sprung to life, the past intensely and vividly present. Then sleep and muffled dreams backed by her son’s soft and continuous moaning.

Saturday, 29 June 2013

Johan
has been in London for a week and it has been a full week, meeting with
the directors of his charitable foundation, interviews, visiting
galleries.

Yesterday,
David DuHaine an old, good friend from back in the early PayPal days
tried to pitch a full drone service to him. Driverless cars and trains,
lightweight drone delivery straight to the eighteenth floor widow. A
docking bay attached to the outside wall.

He
laughed, I have Nastya for that, she would kill me if I replaced her
with a machine. Anyway I can print everything I need now, can’t I? You
can't print a DRC like this, DuHaine said and raised his glass. Positionality is
everythingI Remember? DuHaine quoting one of his own most famous
maxims back at him. Johan took a sip. True, but I am not sure I would
want a bottle delivered by drone either! You would need a hedge,
admittedly, DuHaine replied. They both laughed and DuHaine wagged a
finger at him, don’t get too sentimental about Nastya, didn’t Connaught
say we are ALL going to be replaced by machines, sooner or later?

Ah
yes, Connaught. Connaught was, for all he was ridiculed and derided a
perennial topic at dinner, in conferences. It seemed that, dismiss him as
you might, still, he was always there waiting: puzzling, insane,
conducting who-knew-what kinds of experiments in his research institute
in the Freezone that had opened up in the hinterland between Laos and
Myanmar, in the jungle.

Even
back in the early days when they were all making their fortunes, even
among that select and divinely driven crew of innovators Connaught had
been a wildly visionary, uniquely brilliant and intense personality. For
several years he had managed to hold himself in check, working
alongside Kurzweil and Sharpton at The Singularity University before
suddenly disappearing into the night with nothing but a series of
devastated hotel rooms and bags of exotic pharmacology in his wake, reappearing two years later in the Freezone pushing his thesis on
Techstinction, a more radically nihilistic and negatory corrective to
what he saw as the latent and crippling Humanism in notions of the
Singularity. He rejected both the terms Transhumanism and Extropianism, “we do not aim to improve or transcend the human condition, but to
finally destroy humanity itself in the name of the truly radical, alien
otherness within us, rationality, science, techne,” he declared in the
long, semi-coherent lecture that appeared online two or three years ago.
“Our aim is not enhancement, or transcendence, or eternity, but
creating a technology which will destroy us”. “Tech Guru Connaught Goes
Jim Jones in The Freezone” was the Tech Times headline that greeted his
re-emergence. That seemed to sum up the prevailing attitude.

The
last time they had shared a stage together, not long after Johan had
met Nastya and begun his charitable and curatorial work in earnest, when
Connaught was still, as far as anyone could tell, keeping things
together was at a TEDX conference. Even then Connaughts incipient
madness had begun to disturb those around him, the organisers, the
audience, his fellow panelist, and it was felt that perhaps he was not
quite, young, brilliant billionaire though he was, the ambassador
the Singulairty University had hoped he would be. Johan himself was
perplexed by Connaught’s rambling, poetic, aphoristic speech. Shirt
untucked and tieless, no power-point slides, no tirelessly reiterated,
upbeat, take home message, unless the message was: we are a split and
suicidal species, we must drive forward our own extinction, not merely
as subjects, but materially, as flesh. The end of the lecture was a long
reflection on the term “dull and muddy-mettled rascal” from Hamlet as
far as Johan could recall. Mud and mettle, muddy metal, muddled metal,
dull mud and metalled rascals, the dull mud and the metal rascal.

That was the first indication that Connaught would go rogue. And yet early on, at Stanford, they had been great friends.

Ah Connaught! Ah Post-Humanity!

Still.
He checks his watch, twenty minutes until his session with Calvert, two
hours until he goes out to meet his gopher, Graeme Hargreaves. Johan
has made a point of remembering the name. These touches, this personal
engagement matters even if one is, as the girl from the Guardian
suggested yesterday “richer than Croesus”.

That
interview had been, perhaps, the only negative so far. He instinctively
reaches up to smoothe his jaw-line and is aware suddenly, though he has
clearly been doing it for years, of this reflex action, when a negative
thought or an ego-compromising reflection assails him, how he sets his
own jawline in place, focuses on it, uses it almost as a talisman to
ward off bad spirits. How odd. No doubt many people have such small,
defensive rituals. He pauses and looks around the room as though there
may be some clue to his own behaviour hidden there, though the room is
of course minimally, even austerely furnished, a great white space with a
black leather sofa, a low, heavily lacquered Japanese horigotatsu
table, a huge, ultra-thin, wall mounted flat screen, state-of-the-art
black and silver Samsung speaker poles in each corner for deeply
immersive surroundsound, and little else.

What
other small, supporting tics and twitches of thought, what mechanisms
and bits of barely visible maintenance might his whole persona run on?
He is watching, through his own reflection, a thousand cars moving
through the congested streets, lights coming on in flats and offices,
buses and trains delivering the flow of workers and consumers in and out
of the centre from the suburbs, the invisible army of small-scale tasks
and repeated interventions that sustain the illusion, the fantasy of
the City, its magical enormity, its dream-identity.

For
a second the room, the city through the windows, seems to shift and
tremble, as though some other dimension has momentarily infused itself into this
one, set it quivering. Perhaps, he reaches up for his jaw then checks
himself, he should discontinue this analysis with Calvert. Connaught
perhaps should be a cautionary tale.

Perhaps
it is just that, yes that interview yesterday has disturbed him a
little, despite his reputation for hardness of head, nose and at one
time, heart. A situation he is trying now, through his curating, his
charitable work, his analysis, to remedy.

Yes,
the interview yesterday was a little tougher than these things used to
be ten years ago, when they were all savants and saviours. The crisis
was obviously to blame and he imagined that the piece would carry a
fairly negative tone as any such pieces were obliged to these days if
they focussed on any one who made money before the crash, or had
continued to do so during it. And besides it was for the Guardian. The
FT or The Economist would have been more supportive.

And
yet, yes, he stretched up on tiptoe and settled back down onto his
heels again, he did want to be, not loved, but, seen differently, to be
admired at least. To be, he searched for the right word. Understood.
Connaught would sneer at him, and it was true they seemed to be on
opposite paths, deeply divergent paths, or perhaps simply expressing two sides
of the same, inevitable trajectory.

Yes
he was faintly irritated by the interviewer, a very attractive but
rather presumptuous looking young girl, fresh out of a Classics degree
at Oxford, hence the reference to Croesus no doubt, obsessing over the
phrase “Pay-Pal mafia”. He told her he hadn’t been involved in any of
that for years, asked her, who did we exploit, helping to set up a
payment system online? This is not the mining industry. Yes but the
system. In its totality. This had seemed to be her argument. She had
that faintly superior but brittle English upper-class appeal, an English
Rose. She was probably good on a horse, had impeccable manners, was
spending her twenties pretending to be tough-minded and radical. He felt
a little throb of melancholy desire. She was nothing compared to
Nastya of course. And yet. he would love to somehow win her over.

No
doubt this was why he had agreed to the interview in the first place.
He did find himself seeking her approval, he did feel a need to persuade
her and her readership and the world at large. He stretched up on to
tip-toe involuntarily again and again checked himself. Ah now what was
this, another tic? Lowered himself down more circumspectly. I am not
what you think I am, I am not who I was. I am one of the good guys

She
pushed him on his continuing and endlessly augmenting wealth and his
maxim, Positionality is everything. Had he not cornered many markets in
many types of goods, especially foodstuffs, especially fish? Hadn’t one
of his companies for insistence been racing against the major Japanese
corporations to buy up stocks of Eel, Fugu fish and Blue Fin Tuna while
another was harvesting seeds for particular types of potentially
medicinally beneficial plants and stockpiling as much of the world’s
declining biodiversity as it could in huge greenhouses out in Chilean
Patagonia? Did he not have a vested interest in extinction? In
shortages, in scarcity?

His
answer, which he had immediately sensed she was not prepared to listen
to sympathetically was that both he and his wife thought of themselves
as Curators now rather than business people or entrepreneurs, that they
were in a sense rescuing and maintaining, while on another level restoring and
bringing into life, illuminating great swathes of the past. The past is
not dead and gone, any more than the future is inaccessible, both are
immanent. All I do, he explained is draw value out of the future and use
it to dynamise the past, I rewire it. Create new circuits. Forget the
Future’s market, he quipped, I am heavily invested, in both the personal
and financial senses of that word, in Pasts.

Take
our great OutlierArt initiative, whose mission is to record and collate
the entire artistic output of all humanity, not merely the greats, to
throw open the past and expose every nook and cranny to appreciation. To
rescue the dead. He almost said, that didn’t he? In the interview. Then
thought better of it. Yes, perhaps some man of means will pay an
extraordinary sum for the particular frisson of sitting in that
restaurant in Tokyo or Beijing or Singapore and eating the final
piece, that extravagantly expensive piece of Bue Fin Tuna sashimi,
knowing no other human being now will ever get to savour its unique
delicacy. But this is how he sees his role, as a simultaneous driver
into extinction in some ways and also a redeemer, a bringer into life,
rescuing what was lost, granting recognition to the vast shadow-world of
human endeavour and liberating it from the hierarchies of taste and
judgement, the structures that have suppressed it.

If
a man will pay millions for a sliver of flesh melting on his tongue and
we can use that money to vitalize the great, unexplored, underexploited
past, create more value, reinvest, drive forward more capital into the
future! Look, he said. He became almost impassioned, didn’t he? He knows,
he knows that he and Connaught are cut from the same cloth. He knows
that this is all his mothers and grandfather’s doing, this sense of
mission, this religious fervour. He doesn’t need Calvert to tell him
that. This is the only hope we have. You said earlier, you used the term
“the spatial fix”. Johan waved his hand skyward. There is lot of space
out there still and we will reach it. You perhaps don’t know how close
we are. But there is also the temporal fix, nor are they so distinct,
time and space. The past after all is another country, is it not?

He
smoothes his jawline with the back of his hand, the screen up on the
far wall is making a soft, insistent buzz and he pivots away from the
window, checking the time on his watch. “Activate”, he commands and the
screen clicks on. A soft exhalation of static, a faintly clinical glow
and there is Calvert waiting to begin their session his smooth face,
filling the huge screen, gazing enigmatically out.

Sunday, 23 June 2013

He
loves being up high above the city, especially this city, gazing out
through floor to ceiling windows. The air conditioned cool. The subdued
lighting. He is looking at his own reflection in the window as night
falls. His suit is beautifully cut. He has kept his weight down.

Johan
has, he must confess, an embarrassing obsession with Friedrich’s
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and has had ever since he was a boy.
Because of his mother, no doubt. He used to imagine the Wanderer turning
away from the precipice, seeing his face. Which was of course his own.

Perhaps
he should mention this to Calvert. But perhaps that is too obvious. He
doesn’t want to bore him. Better that he just free associates rather
than try to give him what he thinks Calvert wants. Before he went into
analysis, at Nastya’s request, at Nastya’s insistence, he had his people
prepare several executive summaries on the history, approaches and
latest trends in the field. He knows that one of the biggest problems in
analysis these days is the analysand’s over-familiarity with the
language and protocols of psychoanalysis itself. He attempts therefore
not to provide a running commentary on his own observations, but he
thinks that also Calvert is aware of this. Of a certain suppressed
element. And that perhaps it would be truer, more genuinely revealing if
he were to vocalise those thoughts too. After all, Dr Calvert, the world
is irredeemably meta, is it not?

He
is sure that Calvert will say something like, why do you feel you have
to ask me what you should and shouldn’t say? He feels a sudden burst of
irritation and then almost immediately laughs. Perhaps he should just
talk into a microphone then play it back and analyse himself. Perhaps
there is a programme online that will allow him to run his recording
through an algorithm. That will offer him some concrete analysis, a
diagnosis. Disintermediation. He smiles when he hears that term. What on
earth does that mean? Perhaps he should ask Calvert, who is pre-eminent
in his field. If not that, perhaps he should outsource. No doubt he
could find an online therapist for a fraction of the price. If money
were a consideration. Was it not true that Argentina had the highest
number of psychoanalysts per person in the world? He contemplates going
to his workstation to check this out. Makes a memo to investigate it
more fully but instead merely files the idea away, returns his attention
to the view out across the Thames taking in St Pauls, the Gherkin,
Zhu-Min Heights, Canary Wharf.

He
loves being up high above the city, particularly this city. Night has
fallen. He can see his own reflection clearly now. He has kept his
weight down. He checks his jawline. He has a famous jawline, famously
sharp and he works hard to keep it that way. He never lets his body fat
get above twelve percent. He repeatedly checks his jawline in the
mirror. Does face tightening exercises every night in the bathroom
before bed. Uses a particular and very expensive Japanese
collagen-enhanced horse fat face-cream. He knows the fat in the face
disappears over time as it accumulates unnecessarily elsewhere. Another
of the body’s’ archaic impositions. The body, an atavism.

These
days, one’s face is everything, the integrity of one’s image an
absolute requirement. Yet here we are, shackled to a primitive,
stone-age biology. Yes biology is the battleground. He has already
prepared himself for future surgeries, lifts and implants, regularly
checking out the literature from the best personal cosmeticists around
the world, many of whom are here of course, in London.

Johan
believes that the relationship between the image on the screen and the
face in real life is essential to trust. He has contemplated having
photos digitally manipulated so that he will look a little older than he
is, a little more drawn, perhaps slightly fatter so that when he meets
associates in real life they will be taken aback by how much better he
looks than on screen. He is part owner of a company, Stelth.com that
provides brand and image management support to major corporations and high
net worth individuals, one aspect of which is correcting and improving
any unauthorized photos or videos that appear on the web. He would be
asking for the reverse of course and this is the telling difference
between Johan and his competitors, his peers. He understands that the
really scarce good, the premium good of the future will be the
face-to-face, the unpressured moment of intimacy, the rich and puzzling,
sublime ambiguity of the other.

Perhaps
this is why he has agreed to analysis. Not entirely because he is
incapable of refusing Nastya anything, but because it helps him in
researching that soon to be most sought after commodity of all, direct
contact. He is already toying with a company that will set up face to
face encounters between the A-list clientèle on his Social media
platform Networth and people from radically different backgrounds and
income categories. They have begun trialing it among close associates,
placing executives in neutral, wireless-free rooms for an hour or so
with single mothers or teachers or Bengali immigrants, forcing them to
interact in a radically de-hierarchical and anonymous space, seeing them
emerge sometimes several hours later shaken and exhilarated or
disturbed, adrenalized. Intense, intense, one of his junior employees
repeatedly muttered on emerging from the meeting room and summed up his
83 minute meeting with a 43 year old cleaner from Philadelphia on the
feedback sheet as “ a real white-knuckle ride. ”

Head
back he smoothes his jaw-line with the back of his hand. The rest of
his face is not such a worry to him. His hairline is solid, he has had
enough peels and treatments to keep his skin supple and largely wrinkle
free. Hydration is fundamental as is the right kind of exercise. His
diet is exceptionally nutritionally dense and rigorous, his workout
regimen qualitatively intense.

Sunday, 16 June 2013

The
train that arrives is either 28 minutes late or seven minutes early and
Graeme is fairly sure which of those two it is most likely to be, even
though the poster on the waiting room wall is telling him that 97.3
percent of all trains have arrived at or in advance of their ETA over
the past month.

Such bullshit.

He
takes a seat at the back of the carriage, unconsciously always giving
himself easy access to an escape route, and immediately plugs in his
earphones, starts listening to a mix he’s downloaded, one of the guys
who works in the Shepherd’s Bush branch who has a micro label he’s
running of what he’s called Post-Intelligent Dance Music, which lead
Chris, the Metalhead, to say one night in the Pub, so you mean Stupid
Dance Music? There’s already plenty of that around mate. You going to be
re-releasing Two Unlimited’s back catalogue? To which Stan, face
flushed, said Post doesn’t mean Anti or Non does it? It doesn’t mean the
Opposite of, it means After, to which Chris said, what’s after
Intelligent then? and Stan who basically went to Goldsmiths, came out
with some long, complicated justification for the term and everyone got
bored and started joining in the piss-taking saying stuff like, your
missus is post-attractive and that band are well post-good, geezaaahhh
and this beer is post-tasty and Chris’s mate Noggin started doing his
famous spot-on Tick ‘n’ Tock comedy 80s robotic dancing by the pool
table and going “this beat is Technotronic!” to general hilarity. Only
Graeme didn’t join in, saying yeah mate you do your own thing, you do
your own thing. He tries to be supportive of Stan, more maybe because
he’s been on the receiving end of the piss-taking too than anything else.

The mix was of a genre that Stan was calling Weird Big Beat.

It
is a long mix that doesn’t seem to be either weird or Big Beat and has
what he thinks is actually a Tim Hardin track stuck in the middle for
some reason that Graeme can’t quite figure out, but is probably a smart
part of Stan's overall concept that he just doesn’t get, and he is still
half listening to it, staring out of the window, his mind drifting when
Joolzy gets on at Dartford and comes striding up the aisle toward
him. Graeme pulls his earphones out to greet him.

“Badman!”
Joolzy says and slaps his outstretched hand, sits down in the seat
across the aisle. hears the mix, super tinny at that tiny volume, leaking
from the earphones, pulls a face.

Grame’s
spirits lift. He likes Joolzy, a regular from the record shop days and
he’s glad he’s up for coming down to Margate. He’s a good laugh, even
though, even though he’s had some hard times, Joolzy. He can tell you
some stories. More importantly he isn’t on his own any more. Joolzy would
have your back, if things got bad. Travelling alone these days he is
anxious all the time. Never used to be like that even five years ago,
even two years ago. He tells Joolzy about the confrontation in the Post
Office the previous day as Joolzy shakes his head and whistles between
his teeth.

“No
respect, man. No respect. First up against the wall these pussyoles,
man. Man say that to me he’d be brown bread bruv, get me?”

Graeme
nods, yeah, yeah, Joolzy can look after himself all right, but they both
know the truth. If anybody is going up against a wall in the near-to-mid
term, chances are it’s them.

For
half an hour or so they settle back into their own worlds, half
private, half public, their interfaced bubble, fiddling with their
phones. checking streams and feeds, messages, making sporadic
conversation around clicks and scrolls, screen taps, downloads, games,
showing each other photos.

Graeme
gets a message from Nick Skilling aka DJ Skillz. Hi. Cheers.I can't get
out of work early today, you’ll have to swing by my office. Cheers.
Nick. and a link to Google maps. As he’s checking it out another message
arrives. Just ask for Nick at reception.

Good, good. I love it when a plan comes together! Everything gonna be all right this morning!

At
Ashford International a harassed looking couple in business suits get
on and are angrily saying excuse me, excuse me, honestly, before Graeme
has even had a chance to swivel back into his seat from showing Joolzy a
particularly mentalist clip from the legendary Glasgow Gaba night
Plywood back in 95, saying, looks tranquil to me and Joolzy laughing
saying, that must be the chillout room bruv. The women muttering
something under her breath, could be racial, hard to hear, plausibly
deniable, the man behind striding past with what could be interpreted as
an aloof, a supercilious, a disapproving air.

“Maybe
you two need to chill out a bit. You look like you’re a bit stressed
out.” Joolzy shouts over to them as they put their bags and briefcases
up in the luggage rack and separate out the all-important laptops, the
woman furiously brushing crumbs off the surface of the table they are
about to sit at.

“I said you two look a bit stressed out.”

The woman bites first. “Yes well. We have been working, actually. Do you know what that is?”

Joolzy
produces a can of Stella from his bag and cracks it. "Only fools and
horses work, from what I have heard.” He raises it in a mock salute.
“Looking at you love, I am not sure which one you are.” He slurps foam
from the rim of the can ostentatiously.

“Well,
" she says. She looks to be mid-Thirties and has a mass of damp curly
auburn hair. "I am certain that you’re a fool. A non-working fool.”

“I am hung like a horse, though.”

Graeme laughs. Cheeky.

The
man in the suit, still rummaging irritably in his travel bag, swivels
on his heels. “OK,” he says “that’s enough of that.” He points at the
pair of them. “You two need to behave yourselves. You shouldn’t be
drinking on public transport.”

Immediately
Joolzy stands up and Graeme feels his delight curdle. Joolzy
isn’t especially big, five ten, but he seems bigger. Confidence does
that. The sense that you have a right to occupy the space around you,
the sense that you can expand into it. That sense that Graeme, always
shrinking further and further away inside himself, has never really
understood.

“I am not one of your employees, bruv. Do you get me? You might tell them what to do, you don’t start giving me orders.”

“Well
you never will be one of my employees, will you? Or anybody’s,” Suitman
says, and his jaw's tight, his eyes have got a shine to them and Graeme
knows, yeah, that’s how it is, you are one step away, one step, one
wrong turn, one wrong word from disaster these days.

Joolzy steps out into the aisle and leans confidentially forward,
pouting, brow furrowed looking Suitman up and down. “The trains going to
pull out of this station in 30 seconds. The next station’s fifteen
minutes away. Do you want to be stuck. On this train. With me. For
fifteen minutes. Cause you’re” he leans in even further, drops his voice
to a near whisper “all alone, bruv.”

“Well
the police will be waiting for you at that station.” Suitman’s voice
stays professionally clipped but is thick with rage. He raises his
Blackberry. “Shall I phone them now?”

“Phone
them, make the call. That gives me 15 long minutes. To fuck you up.”
The train has pulled out now with a clank and a soft, accelerating
surge. “I don’t think I’m going to need that long.”

The
woman, who has been busy opening and powering up her laptop says “Oh
you two stop waving your dicks around, this is adolescent.”

“You giving orders too now, is it ?”

“Yes, that’s right “she says, “because someone has to. Someone in this country has to. Are you going to “fuck me up” too?”

Joolzy
sticks out his bottom lip and raises his eyebrows. “ Why not? You might
as well be hanged for a...... horseface as a ....pussyclaat!”’ Then, he
can't help it, he half laughs at his own ingenuity. Where did that come
from?

“Whatever, whatever.” He waves his fingers in Suitman’s face. Begone.

Suitman
sits down, shaking his head. Joolzy screwfaces the woman for a few
seconds then blows air out between his lips and shrugs.

“Pussyclat!” he announces to the virtually empty carriage.

Graeme’s
relieved. Good, it has calmed down. He doesn’t want any run-ins with the
police. From what he’s heard prison is even worse than Giveback, or as
Hooky, the one friend he made on his Nursing course liked to say,
Giveback by other means. It is easier and easier to get locked up these
days mostly for resisting arrest when the police have “warranted
suspicion”. Whatever that means. Total policing, tough sentencing, hard
labour. He imagines he is only ever one step away from some
infringement or infraction that will see him up in court. Prison, that’s
the nightmare.

“You’ve been inside right Joolzy.”

Joolzy is sitting back down now, sipping at the can. He nods. “Twice bruv.”

“How was it?”

“I
am not going to lie to you. Rough. But you know, prison now is not what
it was, it’s a work camp. You’re on a twelve, fourteen hour shift, 20
minute breaks for meals, then ten hours locked down. No TV. No weed. No
visits, no phone. Zero.”

“What
were you in for?” Graeme knows but somehow it is comforting to hear it
again, to imagine that it came about through some set of circumstances
that could never apply to him, or that now, more clued up about it, he
could somehow sidestep.

“Both
times mate they fitted me up for civil disorder. That is a heavy charge
these days. I am lucky I went away when I did. I know people getting
ten years, ten, for that these days. First time was when they had the
riots up in Croydon, they just took in anyone and everyone. Fitted them
up. Second time I got two years for holding an illegal party out on the
Isle of Dogs. Two years.” He shakes his head. “But you know what, if I
need to go back again, I will. If that’s how it’s going to go down, fuck
it.”

“Fuck
it!” he announces to the train, then keeps going, his voice loud, aiming
his words at the couple three seats down, heads buried in their laptop
screens. “Lot of people in this country got nothing to live for. Lot of
people in this country thinking more and more everyday, fuck it. Lot of
the youth getting very restless, man. Very restless. What am I supposed
to be telling them, you know, in my role as mentor to the troubled youth
of London? Keep your nose clean, work hard? For what? It’s a piss-take.”

“It’s a piss-take,” he says again more quietly, and put his knees up on the seat in front. Vexed.

Tuesday, 11 June 2013

It’s
raining when he sets out to get the train to Margate. A very British
rain, cold, relentless, sapping. It seems to have been raining more or
less continuously for the last six months and there has been flooding
everywhere, the Thames getting dangerously high. Graeme puts his hood
up, hood-rat! pats the pockets of his army coat, checking he has his
keys, tobacco tin, the blue plastic oyster card holder he uses as a
wallet, his Claimant Card.

He
buys a packet of rizlas in the Off Licence by Woolwich station, uses a
tenner and then puts the change in a number of different pockets so when
he walks it won’t jangle about and attract attention. He didn’t use
his Claimant Card for two reasons, first he doesn’t want to be building
up debt on it. Second, he knows they track every purchase, every
movement.

It
feels strange to be out and about, going somewhere. He has hardly left
the flat at all in the past three weeks, just nipping out to post
records off or slogging round to the retail park to get Value pasta and beans from his Designated Retail Point, Charlton Asda.
Three whole, glorious weeks with no Giveback that have let him concentrate on making
some money on the side.

Shop a skiver! the rain stippled poster on
Woolwich station tells him, a photo of a swarthy man taking cash
from a disembodied hand in the dimly lit kitchen of some local cafe, and
he feels a distant jolt of panic. He’s sure he won’t get caught, that
he has covered his tracks but you never know, they are cracking down.
Now when he gets emails or texts or letters from the I.W.P. he just
ignores them, unless it’s Giveback dates, better not miss that or, he
involuntarily draws his thumb across his throat makes a quiet squelching
sound out of the corner of his mouth, staring out of the waiting room
window at a pigeon. The pigeon tilts its head in his direction
questioningly. He chuckles. Nah, not you mate. You are all right. Fucking
pigeons. That’s the life.

Or
foxes. There are a couple of foxes live in the Railway siding round the
back of his flat, make a horrible noise at night sometimes and when he
can’t sleep he looks out of the window, sees them standing on the roof
of the lock-ups across on the other side of the road, jaws hanging open,
tongues lolling out, the noise like a cross between a baby screaming
and an android dying. Android. He checks his phone. Nothing. Fiddles
with it, power’s all right, I’ve got the power! Serious as Cancer! He
smiles to himself.

His online piece-work has topped up his housing
benefit and his record trading has turned a small profit so he can keep
his broadband connection. If that gets cut off he is fucked, as fucked
as if they cut off his water. A stab of fear gets in at him, in under his ribs out of nowhere. Dark forces. If he gets cut off now, now that the local
library has closed, now the nearest one, down in Greenwich has started
charging for internet access and there's like thirty people waiting for their thirty minute slot by 8:30 in the morning then he‘ll have to start using internet cafes at
a quid an hour and almost certainly lose the Cloudsource
click-through and O-desk (93 percent positive rating for username
GreyHamAdmin) bits of filing and sorting work that’ve been keeping his head above
water for a start.

It’d knock him out of the loop for his record
trading too, which is getting savage these days. In fact, using cafes would leave
him out of pocket even just for his mandatory 30 hours of online
Jobseek courses, searches and applications. He knows bros who have
found some way of free-riding on other peoples' wireless signals
and who are using routers and mesh systems to pirate bandwidth out of the ether and keep people hooked up for free, and last time he saw Charlie from The
Gladstones he promised to let him know the who, how, and when it was going
to be accessible round Graeme’s area, but who knew when he was going to
bump into Charlie again, especially now he wasn’t working in the
record shop any more.

So, so. If he can just get his hands on something really rare he’ll be
able to hold off disaster a little longer. But disaster is coming, isn’t
it? Extinction Level Event. Nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. He can
feel it in the air, everyone can. Dark forces marshalling, some
obscure and final reckoning lurching up over the horizon.

His
niche is Drum and Bass, though of course he listens to everything,
everything except metal. Can’t stand metal. When he worked down at the
Record and Video exchange in Greenwich he hated working with Chris
because all day it was death metal, crust, sludge, doom, hardcore, black
metal, technical crust, whatever or maybe Gaba, if they were lucky. Plus he had this kind of attitude that anyone who wasn’t into it somehow
didn’t get music and took the piss out of everything else for being too
lightweight. Maybe that was one of the reasons he left, he stopped
getting on with the other guys, who had all been to Uni and used to
take the piss a bit too much, past the point where it was funny.

So
he left to become a Psychiatric nurse but that meant studying and
essay writing and he wasn’t used to it so he freaked out a bit, jacked
it in, couldn’t get his old job back and was embarrassed to keep asking
anyway. So for nearly two years now, isn’t it, fucking hell, two years,
where has that gone, he has been Claiming.

Still, it's all
probably for the best, he has developed a good relationship with a
couple of big collectors in the States and he knows that vinyl, white
labels, test pressings, Japanese editions, coloured vinyl, whatever, is
played out. The market has shifted, the vinyl side of stuff still goes
but it’s finished in terms of anything new or any chance of prices
going up, now the line between music and memorabilia, even just
junk, even just crap, has been blurred, more than blurred. At the moment
whenever he looks at the collectors wants’ list on SoundHound he sees
that cassettes of music taped directly off the radio are changing hands
for silly money, compilations some sixteen year old kid made in 1985
listening to John Peel on his portable radio with all the interference
and the sound fading in and out, sometimes even the sound of the stop
and record buttons getting pressed, bits of DJ banter, noises of people
chatting in the room where it is being recorded, hand-written
tracklists on the insert cards, some with photocopied bits of paper
stuck over them. All that stuff.

That is a huge market but difficult to get access to, someone has opened a site, home taping is still killing music, trying to get people to send him cassettes so he can act as a
middleman and forward them on to collectors he knows, but a lot of
the people who have the stuff don't seem to be interested or don't
know about the site. There is an age gap problem, anyone old enough
to have taped things off the radio is too busy fulfilling their family and work obligations to pay attention to stuff like that on the internet.
Sooner or later though the site was going to to get mentioned in the
papers or a magazine and then the guy who runs it is going to make
plenty of dough, there is a goldmine of stuff just sitting out there
still waiting to be claimed. Claimant alert! He is hoping his brother
will give him his old cassettes he taped off Klik FM back in the day
and on the way back up from Ramsgate he is going to call in at
Maidenhead to see him and Roz, have a cup of tea, try and get them off
him. They’ll split the money of course.

Yeah, this weekend could be the big one in every sense. Shame about
the weather, still it might clear up. Yeah he owes his brother one
for this, for putting him in touch with Skillz. His brother knows
everything about the scene, man, everything and everyone. He used to
cane it back in the day, going out to dances when he was 16 coming home
fucked and their Dad going mental at him. He’s calmed down though,
since he met Roz, since they had Farrah, now he’s got his own business.

That’s
what Graeme needs to do, that’s the way out. He should have done s something like that Home taping site. He has tried to pick up
tips off his E-ntrpreneur (pron: eentrepreneur) courses on Jobseek.com, like running a
just-in-time inventory but this is almost impossible, when he finds a
bargain he has to buy it there and then and so his bedsit is filling up
with records he has no chance of selling though he tries to keep a
tally of what he's bought, how much he’s paid, what has been sold
and at how much, a running total of profit and loss. Of course he’s
better at sorting all this out when he isn’t on a Giveback Scheme,
twenty five hours a week of painting railings and sweeping up leaves
dressed in the regulation Giveback Team blue-grey boilersuit. He has
the idea that if he could just get his act together in terms of the
accounting then he could sign off, run himself as a small company,
that way he can get out of all the hassles and running around of being
a tier-three job-seeker.